Rubio: China is ‘Top Geopolitical Challenge’

Rubio says China benefits from stolen American innovation while expanding influence across technology, energy, and international diplomacy sectors.

Juliette Fairley

Published: 5/15/2026, 3:33:41 AM EDT

Rubio: China is ‘Top Geopolitical Challenge’ — Secretary of State Marco Rubio boards Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews, Md., on May 12, 2026, as he departs for a 3-day visit to China. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images)

President Donald Trump is no longer willing to allow China’s growth to come at American expense, according to Secretary of State Marco Rubio who said the communist bloc is one of the United States' "top geopolitical challenges."

Rubio gave the remarks aboard Air Force One while accompanying Trump and a U.S. delegation on a trip to China.

"China has a plan,” Rubio told Sean Hannity from Fox News. “They believe they will be the world’s most powerful country... and they’re executing on that plan. I don’t blame them, but when that plan is in conflict with the national interest of the United States, we need to do what’s right for the United States."

As a U.S. senator representing Florida, Rubio raised concerns about the Chinese Communist Party’s position on human rights, and as a result, he was sanctioned in August 2020.

This week, however, Rubio was part of the U.S. delegation that met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Beijing to seek help reopening the Strait of Hormuz in Iran.

Intelligence suggests that China is helping the Iranians in its struggle against Operation Epic Fury, launched by Trump in February, and Rubio said that China is heavily dependent on the Strait for its energy.

“It’s in their interest to resolve this,” Rubio said of China. “We hope to convince them to play a more active role in getting Iran to walk away from what they’re doing now and trying to do now in the Persian Gulf.”

Rubio further told Hannity that unique areas of cooperation exist with China, including around the chemical manufacture of fentanyl.

The U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control announced in a 2023 statement that it had identified a China-based network responsible for the manufacturing and distribution of thousands of pounds of fentanyl, methamphetamine, and MDMA precursors.

“China, because their system can do this, can really crack down on that, and that would help lower fentanyl deaths in the United States,” Rubio said.

In the year ending March 2025, there were 77,648 overdose deaths, and in 2024, there were 103,529 overdose deaths, according to Science Direct data.

Another topic the Trump administration planned to discuss with Chinese officials is intellectual property theft, which Rubio said is impacting American companies.

For example, a federal jury convicted former Google software engineer Linwei Ding for stealing more than 2,000 pages of top-secret artificial intelligence (AI) trade secrets, which he allegedly uploaded to build a Chinese startup.

“I don’t think there’s any point in denying that the fact of the matter is that a lot of the advancements—not all, but a lot of the advancements you’ve seen in the commercial sector, in the industrial sector, in the technological sector in China—is a product of intellectual property theft and/or reverse engineering, which is the same thing, of our own technology,” Rubio added.